Apart from mass cultural annihilation, Beatniks, Hee Haw, some dumb-ass sports, and the freak shows of Brentwood, most pop-culture trends are not homegrown but imported to America after prolonged cultivation overseas. Take tofu, for instance, dubbed le curd du soy by uncredited Belgian sailors exploring China centuries before we discovered…
Michael Moore often worries about being seen — and worse, dismissed — as the plump, ball-cap-wearing windbag who barges into company headquarters, demands to see the chairman of the board, then gets kicked out or even arrested. He frets about being reduced to a stuntman of shtick, Captain Ambush, the…
Do not judge Shanghai Noon by its trailer, which serves as the very antithesis of advertising: It begs you to stay far away from any theater in which this film is screening. Laden with dreary sight gags (a horse that stays by sitting … just like a dog) and woeful…
The Belgian film Rosie opens with an interview of a thirteen-year-old girl (Aranka Coppens) in juvenile detention for an unknown crime. The sequence’s immediacy and bareness somehow resemble interview scenes from The 400 Blows and Vivre sa Vie, but this first impression is a mirage. Rosie is less intellectual and…
Quick: Who was the most unbelievable movie character to appear onscreen in recent memory? Jar-Jar Binks? Mini-Me? South Park’s Saddam Hussein? All may be supplanted by Joline (Heather Graham), the main character in Committed. See, Joline is a young, hip New York club owner who actually does what she says…
The following is a list of women who have been raped, mutilated, tortured, enslaved, crippled, or murdered–and quite often, all of the above. In some cases, these women have also suffered miscarriages, been rendered infertile, contracted horrific diseases, and gone insane. Some of them have even been killed twice, perhaps…
To begin let us discuss puking. You know, upchucking, barfing, yacking, Technicolor yawning. Always unpleasant — and yet usually a great relief to a queasy gut — a nice vomit can be provoked by just about anything, but a few catalysts seem to work every time. Agents of proven reliability…
Dinosaurs used to be cool. In 1969 if you had asked me what was the best movie ever made, the answer would likely have been The Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys in the Mexican desert find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen,…
The big screen in these parts keeps getting better. For discriminating fans of fine cinema, the local independent theaters have been offering real treasures lately. Take the beautiful French-Canadian film Set Me Free at the Cosford, the Miami Film Festival hit East-West at Absinthe House, and the amazing double-shot opening…
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men — a ‘fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner — try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Why is it that foreign directors master the coming-of-age story much better than Americans? Maybe it’s because subtlety seems very unchildlike in this nation’s eyes, but subtlety is exactly what this genre needs, and what foreign films often give it. Case in point: the 1999 French-Canadian film Set Me Free…
When Werner Herzog was still a teenager, he found himself living in an apartment with several other boarders — one of them a maniacal, uncontrollable actor named Klaus Kinski. Fifteen years later, he cast Kinski as the lead in Aguirre, Wrath of God, the German director’s first (relatively) big-budget film…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
You’ve got to feel sorry for the Scottish Board of Tourism. First the Loch Ness monster is exposed as a fake, and then their nation’s film industry starts to pick up. Normally a successful film industry would be great for a country’s image, but in the case of Scotland, it…
Despite the titleEast Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug of war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment, and…
Everybody is a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crackup. Bourgeois girls play the precious-and-misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Galadriel. As…
East-West begins in 1946, as a French woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) accompanies her physician husband (Oleg Menchikov) back to his Russian homeland, in response to Stalin’s campaign for repatriating those who fled the revolution. They immediately discover Stalin’s overtures are simply a sadistic come-on. Nearly all the returnees are executed or…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get a hold of me…” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice…
In 1996 thirtysomething Chilean authors Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez wrote a manifesto that rejected magic realism as the hallmark of Latin-American literature. In place of the fantastic town Macondo found in the most famous magically real novel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fuguet and Gomez suggest…
The writer Willa Cather once speculated that the modern world came into existence in 1922 or thereabouts. Marisa Sistach’s El Cometa (The Comet) makes a better case for 1910. The film tells the story of two Mexican revolutions — one political, the other cultural — simultaneously evolving that year. The…
Beginning with its title — the indeterminate-sounding At Midnight and a Half — Marite Ugas and Mariana Rondon’s film cultivates a preoccupation with suspended states (a preoccupation suggested even more forcefully by the curiously circular syntax of the Spanish title, A La Media Noche y Media). Alienated lovers, lost children,…
